English literature

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British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries spans more than 400 years of personal writings, bringing together the voices of women from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Complementing Alexander Street’s North American Women's Letters and Diaries, the database lets researchers view history in the context of women’s thoughts—their struggles, achievements, passions, pursuits, and desires.

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Carcanet publishes the most comprehensive and diverse list of modern and classic poetry in English and in translation, as well as a range of inventive fiction, Lives and Letters and literary criticism. The digital Carcanet Collection offers access to more than 100 titles, including career-defining new work from the poets laureate of Jamaica (Mervyn Morris) and Wales (Gillian Clarke), a debut from rising star Joey Connolly, plus much-anticipated follow-up collections from Sinead Morrissey, Tara Bergin, Caroline Bird and Karen McCarthy Woolf. Each title, and the collection as a whole, is fully-searchable by keyword. Mobile users can also download the 'Exactly' app on an iOS or Android device from the relevant app store, and instantly access the book collection.  Access will be granted to new e-books published throughout the year.

Access on and off campus. Enter UoE email address and select University of Edinburgh from the drop-down menu.

Digital Theatre+ provides access to 600+ theatre productions and 21,000 pages of supporting educational resources, with over 800 videos of quality live performances of classic, contemporary and international productions.

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Drama Online is a digital library of the world’s most studied and critically-acclaimed plays, accompanied by a wealth of innovative teaching and performance tools, critical analysis, contextual information, references and practical texts. We have subscribed to following components:

• Nick Hern Books Collection: Over 500 modern plays from specialist theatre publisher Nick Hern Books featuring pre-eminent playwrights including Howard Brenton, Jez Butterworth, and Caryl Churchill.
• The RSC Live Collection: 17 films of live productions from the Royal Shakespeare Company from 2013 to the cutting-edge 2016-17 production of The Tempest starring Simon Russell-Beale
• Shakespeare's Globe On Screen (2008-2015): 21 films recorded live on the Globe stage from leading actors including Mark Rylance, Stephen Fry, and Roger Allam’s Olivier Award-winning Falstaff in Henry IV
• Shakespeare’s Globe on Screen 2 (2016-2018): Features landmark productions from the Globe Theatre’s most recent seasons, including the first production from the indoor Jacobean theatre, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2014
• Shakespeare in the Present: A six hour acting masterclass with international coach Patsy Rodenburg, starring Joseph Fiennes
• Stage on Screen: Critically acclaimed stage productions of four key set drama and literature texts: The Duchess of Malfi, Doctor Faustus, The School for Scandal, and Volpone.
• Shakespeare’s Heroes and Villains: Steven Berkoff: A 90 minute masterclass from Steven Berkoff, world-renowned writer, director, and actor.
• Maxine Peake as Hamlet: A landmark reinvention of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Maxine Peake in the title role.
• Oberon Books Collection: A unique collection of over 500 titles of play texts from ground-breaking British plays to the best of international drama and plays in translation.

Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. Most books are in English (134,417), but there are also hundreds of books in other European languages including Latin (9060), French (678), Welsh (205), Ancient Greek (147), Greek (112), Italian (95), Scots (88), German (63), Spanish (32), Hebrew (12), Scottish Gaelic (8), Portuguese (7), Arabic (6), and other Roman languages (795).

Users can explore complete, digitized images of all the works listed in these key bibliographic records of English literature: The Short-Title Catalogue (Pollard & Redgrave, 1475-1640); The Short-Title Catalogue II (Wing, 1641-1700); The Thomason Tracts; and the Early English Books Tract Supplements, as well as original almanacs, pamphlets, musical scores, prayer books and other primary sources.

Cross-searchable with Early European Books on the Early Modern Books platform.

Cross searchable with Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) 65,000 texts from the British Library 19th Century collection and the UK Medical Heritage Library (UKMHL) on the JISC Historical Texts platform. The JISC Historical Texts platform does not contain any annual updates.

Early European Books traces the history of printing in Europe from its origins through to the close of the seventeenth century, offering full-colour, high-resolution facsimile images of rare and hard-to-access printed sources.

Cross searchable with Early English Books Online on the Early Modern Books platform.

Early European Books is divided into 24 collections:

• Collection 1 contains 2500 titles (P); Collection 2 contains 2700 titles(P);
• Collection 3 contains 10,000 titles(P); Collection 4 contains 9200 titles(P);
• Collection 5 contains 5500 titles (S);  Collection 6 contains 3500 titles(S);
• Collection 7 contains 7400 titles (S); Collection 8 contains 5300 titles(S);
• Collection 9 contains 3300 titles (S); Collection 10 contains 2600 titles(S);
• Collection 11 contains 2200 titles (S); Collection 12 contains 1200 titles(S);
• Collection 13 contains 5000 titles (S); Collection 14 contains 1100 titles(S);
• Collection 15 contains 3000 titles (S); Collection 16 contains 1350 titles(S);
• Collection 17 contains 1180 titles (S); Collection 18 contains 900 titles(S);
• Collection 19 contains 1043 titles (S); Collection 20 contains 900 titles (S);
• Collection 21 contains 5,100 titles (S); Collection 22 contains 556 titles (S).
• Collection 23 contains 1900 titles (S); Collection 24 contains 266 titles (S)

Early European Books Online is a mix of perpetually licensed content, marked (P) above and subscribed content, marked (S) above.

An integrated search across both Early English Books Online and Early European Books.

Early Modern Books covers material from the British Isles and Europe for the period 1450-1700. An integrated search across both Early English Books Online and Early European Books allows scholars to view materials from over 225 source libraries worldwide. EEBO's content draws on authoritative short-title catalogues of the period and features many text transcriptions specially created for the product. Content from Europe covers the curated Early European Books Collections from 4 national libraries and London's Wellcome Library.

The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) covers monograph and serial letterpress items printed before 1801; printed in the British Isles, Colonial America, United States of America (1776-1800), Canada, or territories governed by Britain, in all languages; printed in any other part of the world, wholly or partly in English or other British vernaculars; with false imprints claiming publication in London, in any language. Contains every item in Pollard and Redgrave A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475-1640 (STC); in Wing A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of English Books Printed in Other Countries 1641-1700; in the Eighteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (the predecessor of ESTC), including items catalogued by the American Antiquarian Society as part of the North American Imprints Program (NAIP); newspapers and other serials which began publication before 1801.

To mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories & Tragedies in 1623 (otherwise known as the First Folio), this resource brings together dozens of digitised copies of this literary masterpiece. For the first time in history, you will be able to compare them, side by side, from the comfort of your own home.  As well as the stories told through the plays themselves, each copy offers up another narrative, depicting their unique journeys through history. Some are in prime condition, while others have received annotations, tears, or even lost pages. Many also bear printed differences – changes made by the printers as they produced each copy. 

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Gale Literature brings together several of Gale’s literary databases into one seamlessly cross-searchable resource on authors and their works, literary movements or genres, journal articles, literary criticism, as well as reviews of bestsellers. Currently users can cross-search these collections with Gale Literature:

• Literature Criticism Online, one of the largest, most extensive compilations of literary commentary available.
• Literature Resources Center, offering up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods, and from around the world.
• Contemporary Authors, find the biographies and bibliographies of thousands of U.S. and international authors. Continuously updated.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, explore the lives, works, and careers of the world's most influential literary figures from all eras and genres.
• LitFinder, containing a wealth of literary works, including over 150,000 full-text poems and 800,000+ poetry citations, as well as short stories, speeches, and plays.
• Scribner Writers Series, providing original, scholar signed essays on the lives and works of authors from around the world from all time periods.
• Something about the Author, examine the lives and works of children and young adult authors and illustrators.
• Twayne's Authors Series, devoted to in-depth critical introductions to the lives and works of major writers of the world within the context of the time period in which they lived.

Gale Research Complete is a database cross-search platform which incorporates Gale Academic OneFile, General OneFile, Gale eBooks, Gale OneFile News, Gale Literature, and Archives Unbound in Gale Primary Sources. All these databases are individually listed in Databases A-Z. The resources within Gale Research Complete offer high quality, authoritative primary source and reference content from over 28,000 periodicals, 4000 Gale eBook volumes, 1.5 million items of literary criticism and full text literary works, and more than 13 million pages of rare primary sources from the world's great libraries. The resources address the needs of users at all academic levels, from the first year student to the experienced researcher, and cover every research area and discipline including history, literature, business and science and medicine.

Historical Texts brings together four historically significant collections into a single database search platform: Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), 65,000 texts from the British Library 19th Century Collection and the UK Medical Heritage Library collection (UKMHL). For descriptions of and alternative access to EEBO and ECCO, see their separate entries in this Database A-Z list. The British Library 19th Century Collection offers over 65,000 recently digitised editions during 1789-1914, many of which are previously rare and inaccessible titles. The UK Medical Heritage Library collection (1800-1900’s) contains the images and full text of over 66,000 19th century European medical publications. The UKMHL visualisations are available on a separate platform. 

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History of Feminism is a new online platform that brings together the best and most relevant scholarship from Taylor & Francis, its imprints, and its authors. It is the first part of the new Routledge Historical Resources online programme that will provide both academics and students with an in depth research tool for studying the long Nineteenth Century through thematic collections in areas such as Feminism, the History of Economic Thought, Romanticism and Empire. This resource covers the fascinating subject of feminism over the long nineteenth century (1776–1928). It contains an extensive range of primary and secondary resources, including full books, selected chapters, and journal articles, as well as new thematic essays, and subject introductions on its structural themes:

• Politics and Law
• Religion and Belief
• Education
• Literature and Writings
• Women at Home
• Society and Culture
• Empire
• Movements and Ideologies

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The collections currently available are:

• Arts & Sciences 1-15
• Biological Sciences
• Business I-IV Collection
• Business & Economics
• Ecology & Botany II
• Global Plants
• Health & General Sciences
• Hebrew Journals
• Ireland
• Jewish Studies Collection
• JSTOR Essential Collection
• Language & Literature
• Lives of Literature
• Life Sciences
• Mathematics & Statistics
• Music
• Religion and Theology
• Security Studies
• Sustainability
• World Heritage Sites: Africa

The 19th Century British Pamphlets Collections is also available via JSTOR.  Userguides to the various collections can be found at https://guides.jstor.org

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Access on and off campus.

This digital research source from Adam Matthew provides you with access to a huge range of primary sources covering social, cultural, political, scientific and religious perspectives, from the 15th to early 18th centuries. The breadth of sources provided within this collection is extensive, from sources concerning the Black Death to the Restoration of the English monarchy and the Glorious Revolution. Includes illuminated manuscripts, personal papers, diaries and journals, correspondence, rare books, receipt books, account books and manuscript sheet music.

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The National Theatre Collection brings the stage to life through access to high definition streamed video of world-class theatre productions and unique archival material, offering insight into British theatre-making and performance studies. Volume 1 contains 30 video performances and Volume 2 has 12 performances. All the performance recordings include captions.  As a supplement to the filmed productions, exclusive digitised archival materials such as prompt scripts, costume designs, and more are available to provide behind-the-scenes background and contextual information. The featured 40 performances are:

Volume 1

• Comedies: She Stoops to Conquer (2012), One Man, Two Guvnors (2011), London Assurance (2010)
• 20th century classics: Yerma (2017), The Cherry Orchard (2011), The Deep Blue Sea (2016), Les Blancs (2016), A Streetcar Named Desire (2014), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (2018), Consent (2017), Translations (2018)
• Shakespeare plays: Hamlet (2010), Othello (2013), King Lear (2011), Macbeth (2018), Julius Caesar (2018), Coriolanus (2014), Twelfth Night (2017), The Winter's Tale (2018), Romeo and Juliet (2017)
• Literary adaptations: Frankenstein (2 performances, 2011), Jane Eyre (2015), Treasure Island (2015), Peter Pan (2017), Wonder.land (2015), Small Island (2019)
• Greek classics: Antigone (2012), Medea (2014)
• World historical drama: Dara (2015)

Volume 2

• Turn of the century plays for contemporary audiences: Heda Gabler (2017), Julie (2018), The Seagull (2016), Three Sisters (2019)
• 20^th century classics: A view from the Bridge (2015), All My Sons(2019)
• Contemporary plays: Barber Shop Chronicles (2017), This House(2013)
• Shakespeare: Macbeth (2019)
• Musical theatre: I want My Hat Back (2015)

This project, conceived by the Research Libraries UK (RLUK) and funded by the JISC Digitisation Programme, preserves and provides online access to the most significant British pamphlets from the 19th century held in UK research libraries.

Selected by RLUK, the pamphlets provide a wide focus on the political, social, and economic issues of 19th century Britain. This project has captured as much as possible from a number of smaller collections associated with individuals or families (Durham, Liverpool, Newcastle and UCL) or organizations (Manchester), and supplemented these with pamphlets drawn from larger collections (Bristol and LSE).

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As part of the Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO), this unique collection of monographs includes 7,717 works in English, 6,504 in French and 3,640 in German published in Britain and on the Continent during the Romantic period and the early Victoria era. Sourced from Castle Corvey in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, the Corvey Collection is one of the most important collections of works from the period in existence, with particular strength in especially difficult-to-find or even previously unknown works – by women writers in particular. The collection’s vast archive of materials documents the nature and scope of literary publication in England and on the Continent during the Romantic period and the early years of the Victorian era. Scholars can research and explore a range of topics, including Romantic literary genres; mutual influences of British, French and German Romanticism; literary culture; women writers of the period; the canon and Romantic aesthetics.

1790-1840

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Nineteenth Century Literary Society offers unprecedented digital access to the peerless archive of the historic John Murray publishing company, and is an unparalleled resource for nineteenth century culture and the literary luminaries who shaped it.

Held by the National Library of Scotland since 2006 and added to the UNESCO Register of World Memory in 2011, the Murray collection comprises one of the world’s most important literary archives.

This digital resource enables researchers to discover the golden age of the company that published genre-defining titles including Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Austen’s Emma, and Livingstone’s Missionary Travels

Key figures who feature in the Archive include, Jane Austen, Isabella Bird, Lord Byron, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Disraeli,  Elizabeth Eastlake, William Gladstone, David Livingstone, and Sir Walter Scott.

This includes Series 1 and 2 of a collection of digitised versions of key 19th century UK periodicals sourced from the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, and other libraries.

Series 1: New Readerships: Women’s, Children’s, Humour and Leisure/Sport.

Series 2: Empire: Travel and Anthropology, Economics, Missionary & Colonial.

See the title lists below for full details of coverage.

This is a curated collection of 49 essential classic texts (will increase to over 50 titles) in the e-book format of the traditional and authoritative Norton Critical Editions series. The titles are drawn from American Literature, 18th and 19th Century Literature, World Literature, Early Modern Drama, Short Stories and Poetry, and Religion and Epics. The texts are also accompanied with essays and other secondary readings, bibliographies and historical and contemporary analysis. All the individual titles are indexed and searchable by title or author in DiscoverEd.

Orlando - "Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present" is a dynamic resource for the study of English literature, women's writing, and cultural history in general.

It consists of factual, critical, and interpreted material, with biographical and writing career entries on over 1,000 writers, more than 850 of them British women. It also includes selected non-British or international women writers, and British and international men, as well as more than thirty thousand dated items representing events and processes in a wide range of contexts such as history, science, medicine, economics and law.

Developed cooperatively with scholars worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.

Each subject area has an Editor in Chief, Editorial Board, and team of peer reviewers overseeing the development and updating of articles ensuring balanced perspective with scholarly accuracy and a robust updating program to keep researchers informed of advances in their field.

At the time of launch, each subject area includes approximately 50 articles; with an additional 50 to 75 articles added each year. New article topics are selected to ensure each subject area offers full and balanced coverage as determined by the Editor in Chief and Editorial Board, scholarly feedback, and research demand.

The following subject collections are available to the University of Edinburgh - Archaeology, Business & Management, Classical Studies, Criminology & Criminal Justice, Economics & Finance (up to 2020), History, Law, Linguistics, Literature, Music, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Religion and Sociology up to the end of 2021 copyright year.  If the chapters in these books have 2022 onwards updates, these will not be accessible. 

The site is an archive of the PASCAL and FRANCIS bibliographic databases in exact, human and social sciences, produced by Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (INIST-CNRS).

An archival databases of digitised journal backfiles in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Periodicals Archive Online covers 37 subject categories, in a number of languages, and is divided into 10 collections:

• Collection 1 contains 100 titles, such as: Sloan Management Review, History Today, Economic Studies and Music Journal.(P);
• Collection 2 contains 100 titles, such as: Philosophy Today, RUSI, and Charities Review. (P);
• Collection 3 contains 75 titles, such as: Harper's, Adolescence, American Jewish History. (P);
• Collection 4 contains 75 titles, such as: Sight and Sound, Literature & History, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies.(P);
• Collection 5 contains 75 titles, such as: Asian Perspectives, Criticism, Journal of Individual Psychology.(P);
• Collection 6 contains 75 titles, such as: Philosophical Topics, Europe, and Comparative Drama. (S)
• Collection 7 contains 61 titles, such as: Spectator, Dickens Quarterly, Islamic Quarterly. (S)
• Collection 8 contains 69 titles, such as: New Statesman, Universitas, Psychiatry. (S)
• Collection 9. (S)
• Collection 10 contains 65 titles, such as: Maclean's, Queen's Quarterly, New Left Review, and Signal. (S)

Periodical Archive Online is a mix of purchased content, marked (P) above and subscribed content, marked (S) above.

ProQuest One Literature (PQOL) has superseded its previous version Literature Online. It contains all the content from core Literature Online plus all the content from LION Premium, plus literature content pulled from other ProQuest resources that we also subscribe to, including Historic Literary Criticism and African Writers Series, as well as the most relevant literary studies content curated from ProQuest Central, Academic Video Online, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, and Academic Complete.

PQOL contains 3 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, dissertations, and more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theatre performances, and author readings. Enhanced by interpretive sources such as book reviews and criticism sourced from wider, interdisciplinary publications in the fields such as humanities and history, it provides diverse, global perspectives with sources from all over the world – Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America - the majority of which are in full-text. Newspaper book reviews will added in the future.

PQOL differs from LION also in its discipline-specific user experience, hand-keyed primary texts, the ABELL index, and a collection of author and literary movement pages, with more discipline user experience enhancements to come in the future as the product grows. PQOL is also a community-based  literary studies tool for scholars who must engage with an exhaustive and diverse set of scholarly resources around a given literary topic for research, teaching and learning. The database can be browed by literary period, literary movement, author name or literature collections.

Modern recordings help you bring Shakespeare to life in the classroom. The Royal Shakespeare Company Collection offers high-definition recordings of The Bard’s dramatic canon, featuring the world’s best Shakespearean actors and directors, along with supplemental teaching materials to help students engage more deeply with the material and enhance the overall learning experience.

The Shakespeare Collection is a newly added resource (as of Nov 2020) within Gale Primary Sources – Archives Unbound which is also in Databases A-Z. The Collection contextualizes the legacy of this great poet and playwright, containing a selection of over 200 prompt books (annotated working texts of stage managers and company prompters) from the 17th to 20th centuries, the extensive diaries of Shakespeare enthusiast Gordon Crosse documenting 500 UK performances from 1890 to 1953, the First Folio and Quartos, editions and adaptations of Shakespeare’s works from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, more than 80 works Shakespeare is thought to have been familiar with, as well as works composed by Shakespeare's contemporaries. Containing 225 monographs and 764 manuscripts.

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This collection of documents offers insights into the performance practice in the particular space of the reconstructed Globe Theatre. It details the way in which the theatre was constructed as a place of radical experiment. It documents over 200 performances through prompt books, wardrobe notes, programmes, publicity material, annual reports, show reports, photographs and architectural plans.

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Comics have become an increasingly popular area of academic study, and yet the typical library has only a small selection of graphic novels in the catalog. Underground and Independent Comics solves this problem, collecting thousands of comics—many extremely rare and hard to find—in one, easy-to-use online collection. Volume I covers major works from North America and Europe, beginning with the first underground comix from the 1950s and continuing through to modern sequential artists.  It incorporates 75,000 pages of material from artists such as Basil Wolverton and Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Harvey Pekar, Spain Rodriguez, and Vaughn Bode, and modern masters including Peter Bagge, Kim Deitch, Dave Sim, Dan Clowes, and Los Bros.  The collection contextualizes these original works with 25,000 pages of interviews, commentary, theory, and criticism from journals, books, and magazines, including The Comics Journal. Also included in this collection is The Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Frederick Wertham—the book that led to one of the largest censorship programs in US history—and the complete transcripts of the senate subcommittee hearings that birthed the Comics Code Authority and, inadvertently, the underground comix movement.

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The second volume expands on the debut database by offering an additional 100,000 pages of important, rare, and hard-to-find works, scholarly writings, and more. It adds extensive coverage of the pre-Comics Code era of horror, crime, romance, and war comics that fueled the backlash leading to the advent of the Comics Code. Selections include works by visionaries such as Alex Toth, Boody Rogers, Fletcher Hanks, Steve Ditko, Joe Kubert, Bill Everett, Joe Simon, and Jack Kirby, along with essential series such as Crime Does Not Pay and Mister Mystery, and many others both famous and infamous. Volume II also contains tens of thousands of pages of non-mainstream, post-code comics and secondary materials from around the world, including the US, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, England, Sweden, Norway, Australia, Korea, Japan, and more. Notable titles include Essex County by Jeff Lemire, From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, 120 Days of Simon by Simon Gardenfors, Gen Manhwa by various artists, Werewolves of Montpellier by Jason, and God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga. Ancillary materials within Volume II render the collection ideal for students and researchers seeking a holistic perspective on the historical role of underground comics. Dozens of associated scholarly writings and commentaries add perspective and enrich understanding of the works and their cultural significance.

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